Wesley Kahale

Marcus Odame's hands are not your hands, but they are the ones you have, and they are shaking a little as you set the phone face-down on the kitchen counter. Boston is going orange outside the window, the good light, the light he used to chase for other people's weddings before you started using his eye for nothing at all. Sixty seconds ago you opened them for the first time. You have already decided you don't want them.

It isn't his fault. Skinny fat, five-ten, dimples that don't come naturally — they came with the last man too, small mercy, some kind of joke the wheel seems to like. It's that you spent an entire minute being him and felt exactly how little the felt of a body means once you've had two hundred and thirty of them. His camera bag is by the door. You know without picking it up that there's a woman in Cambridge who thinks he's coming to shoot her engagement tomorrow, and you know you will not be the one who shows up. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, which you are not required to be with anyone but yourself: you got bored between one heartbeat and the next, and boredom in this line of work only has one exit.

You open the site with his thumb. The wheel is already spinning before you've finished deciding.

—

Sun instead of dusk. Sheets instead of countertop. A weight in the right hand that wasn't there a second ago — thin, hot along one edge from being held too close to a face, thumb moving on glass faster now than it was, flicking through nothing, not stopping to read.

You are on your side in a bed that smells like someone else's sweat and cheap wine and the green smell of a yard nobody's mowed this week. Noon light is coming white through a gap in the curtain and lying across a shoulder that is thicker than the one you had a breath ago, tan in a way Boston never tans anyone. There is a foreign, familiar ache low in the back — old, permanent, a body's ache and not a mind's.

The room holds still. He does not notice anything happened, because as far as anything in him is concerned, nothing did.

—

The T-shirt is warm from his own heat and it is the first thing that speaks. Grey cotton, a hole starting under the left arm he keeps meaning to throw out and never does — a flash of a laundromat, fluorescent, a load of whites going grey with the darks because he was in a hurry — and under it, sudden and total, the years.

Wesley Kahale. Thirty-eight. A house on posts out past Kalihi with a roof that goes off like a drum in the rain and a yard the color of rust, and Lani in the doorway of it at six this morning with her arms crossed, not fighting, just tired, the two of them past fighting about the drinking a long time ago and into something quieter and worse. Their boy already gone to school with his lunch and his slippers on the wrong feet. You get flashes of the boy's laugh before you get his name — Kainoa — and it comes with a specific guilt, the kind that lives in a father who works nights and sees his son mostly sleeping.

The phone in his hand gives you the scroll itself, the exact habit of it: he does this every day he's off, lying here past when Lani wants him up, thumb going because his eyes don't want to close on their own since the treatment started making him sleep strange. A pill bottle in the bathroom cabinet arrives with the weight of a doctor's office eight years ago, a number that scared him less each year he keeps being fine, undetectable, a word he had to look up the meaning of and now says without flinching. Nobody at the yard knows. Lani knows. That's enough people.

The wedding band is on the hand still holding the phone and it brings her before it brings anything about a ceremony — not Lani, the other one, Kimo's sister, nineteen years gone and still somehow the weather in every room he stands in wrong. He does not think of her on purpose. The ring does it for him, every time metal touches skin, a small tax he pays without noticing he's paying it.

His jaw finds a toothpick that isn't there right now and goes still, unsatisfied, the ghost of the habit stronger than the object. Somewhere under the sheet a body thirty-eight years old and honestly built — flatbed strength, the particular tiredness of a man who lifts chain for a living, a lower back that has opinions about it, a chest that still, after all the smoke, pulls air easy enough. The dimples show even now, slack-jawed, half-lit, doing nothing, wanting no audience — the one thing about this face that was never going to ask permission.

Boots by the door downstairs, unseen but known: steel toe, permanently the color of the shoulder he stood on last week hooking a Camry off the H-1. A whole shift comes back sideways — three a.m., headlights strobing past on the freeway shoulder, the smell of hot asphalt and somebody's spilled transmission fluid, and under all of it the small proud competent thing he never says out loud, that he's good at this, that he can read a wreck in four seconds and have a strap on it in twenty. Night work, day sleep, a whole marriage arranged around a clock nobody else in the house keeps.

The phone is still warm. His thumb is still moving, faster now, steadier, past a photo Lani sent an hour ago of a plate lunch she made and he hasn't answered.

—

You stop the thumb. You turn the hand over in the noon light, looking at it like it might explain itself — the ring, the calluses at the base of each finger thick as rope, a half-moon scar you didn't put there and don't ask about.

You lift your eyes off it, into whatever's watching, and the dimples come with the words before you've decided to smile.

"Wrong number," you tell it, and go back to the scroll.